Frac Spread: Steel Yourself For NGL Trade War?

This week’s nor’easter tearing into the stretch between New Jersey and Maine was barely a blip on the radar at CERAWeek by IHS Markit. Folks at the Hilton Americas-Houston had their eyes on the dark clouds of a trade war on the horizon.

“Overseas exports are the only thing balancing natural gas and NGL markets, and increasingly crude oil also relies on exports to clear light-sweet volumes from U.S. shale plays,” wrote Rusty Braziel of RBN Energy LLC early in the week. The titans of global energy repeated the sentiment from the conference’s ballroom stage again and again.

“We buy not only pipe, but we buy valves and things that aren’t manufactured in the United States,” said Greg Armstrong, CEO of Plains All American Pipeline LP (NYSE: PAA), on the first day of the event. “And so we don’t think that it would be appropriate to put a tariff on something that you can't buy here in the United States.”